Sunday, November 8, 2015

I was watching 60 Minutes following the Denver Broncos first loss of this season. The article on the Large Hadron Collider was very interesting and at the very end of the article one of the scientists being interviewed said:

"Whose to say what we can or cannot do 100 years from today?"

His example before his concluding comment was, and I am paraphrasing because I am working from memory,

"Do you think someone 100 years ago would say about reaching into your pocket, pulling out a device, press a few keys and be talking to someone halfway around the world!"

In that context, his closing comment makes perfect sense.

But I do have an answer, Creationists.

Isn't that exactly what people like the Discovery Institute, Answers in Genesis, and the Institute for Creation Research are trying to do? Rather than allow science to do what has been pretty damn successful for decades now, they want to replace actual science with their religious beliefs. Read Karl Giberson blog post, "Discovery Institute Still Undermining Science". Using often discredited arguments, they keep attacking science, dressing philosophical arguments as if they are science for the express purpose of forcing the scientific community to stop doing science and validate their [the Creationists'] religious beliefs. Look at their arguments:

'Teach the controversy', when there is no scientific controversy, but an artificial one created by marketing and politicking.

'Teach the strengths and weaknesses', without having one actual weakness identified in evolutionary theory and spend time denigrating the strengths whenever possible.

'Teach both sides and let students make up their own mind', sure teach religion as if it is science and that will make a level playing field for students to figure things out for themselves? Yea, how well is that working in any subject?

These arguments have nothing to do with actual science other than to undermine it in the minds of all too many people.

Just a few excerpts from Gilberson's post:

"Evolution is a remarkable theory. Its complexity and breadth guarantee
that there will be ongoing debates and controversies about the details
and scientific journals are filled with these debates. But these debates
are not about whether evolution should be abandoned and replaced with
appeals to a supernatural creative power. That question was resolved in
the 19th century."

"The actual scientific controversies are not the ones that the
anti-evolutionists want to see in America's public schools. We do our
students no favor by pretending that religiously motivated objections to
well-established ideas constitute genuine scientific controversies."

The one I personally like is:

"Even if you focused on one small subfield -- say fossils from the
Cambrian era -- it would take you years to get to the point where you
could deal with the data directly and draw your own conclusions."

Remember Stephen C. Meyer's 'Darwin's Doubt', which concerns itself with the Cambrian Diversification, colloquially known as the 'Cambrian Explosion'. Do you think Meyer spent the time necessary reading and studying the existing data in order to draw his own conclusions? Let me remind you that not only is Meyer not a paleontologist, but in addressing some of his critics in the sequel "Debating Darwin's Doubt", he failed to bring in an actual paleontologist to address the many criticisms, like this one from an actual paleontologist (here is the whole critique):

"Another common tactic of
creationists is credential mongering. They love to flaunt their Ph.D.'s
on their book covers, giving the uninitiated the impression that they
are all-purpose experts in every topic. As anyone who has earned a Ph.D.
knows, the opposite is true: the doctoral degree forces you to focus on
one narrow research problem for a long time, so you tend to lose your
breadth of training in other sciences. . . ."

" . . . Meyer now
blunders into another field in which he has no research experience or
advanced training: my own profession, paleontology. I can now report
that he's just as incompetent in my field as he was in molecular
biology. Almost every page of this book is riddled by errors of fact or
interpretation that could only result from someone writing in a subject
way over his head, abetted by the creationist tendency to pluck facts
out of context and get their meaning completely backwards."

Perfect example of what Giberson was saying! If you want people to draw their own conclusions about complex scientific subjects, they need specialized training to even begin to understand the current state of knowledge on the subject.

Yes, people are entitled to their opinions, but opinions are not necessarily equal, especially about complex subjects. In my own field I frequently hear customers offer opinions on how long it should take computer programmers to build even something that seems simple. The problem is without an understanding of the underlying code and architecture involved, even simple things have level of complexity non-programmers are not equipped to understand. Yet folks like the Discovery Institute, and others, want people to be able to make up their own minds about something as complicated as Evolutionary theory? Hopefully food for thought!

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Welcome to my little corner of the Internet

This blog is more a way for me to clarify my own thinking and opinions more than for any other purpose. I like writing things down, having links to source material, and offering my own $.02. I find a blog let's me do that. I encourage comments and emails from any who wish to do so. I am not shy, as you might have noticed, and I am also not afraid of a dissenting view. I might disagree with you, but I will defend your right to say what you think as well as I expect the same respect!

Why blog on this particular topic? Well after seeing the tactics of groups like the Discovery Institute, I couldn't stay silent on the subject. After the Discovery Institute spins their lies, after the defendants in the Dover trial LIED under oath, and after Texas fired their state science curriculum director for forwarding an email appropriate to her duties-- I couldn't sit back and just watch.

I don't filter any comments, with two exceptions. Comments that are nothing more than a link to some other website hawking some service or material will get deleted. Also any comment that is abusive or derogatory will also get deleted. To date (July 2016) I have had to delete very few service/material types and only one truly abusive comment!

Thanks.

About Me

I am a family man who works in Ohio, Information Technology and computer programming are my areas of expertise. For those of you who know me, growing grass in my backyard is obviously not, so quit laughing!
Why blog? In all honesty, why not? It's fun, has been very educational, and it also has offered me insights into people and positions I may not have thought much about before. (http://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers)